Utila Scuba Dunks

This is just a quick one…Back in our Utila post, we told you all about the fun we had diving and coming up with the materials to play underwater basketball. Well, our mate Joel has finished his editing work and come up with this awesome video!! We love it!

If you like it, you can check out his other work here: www.joelsharpe.com.

Honduras III – Becoming Divemasters in Utila

While the land based attractions at Utila were great, our main reason to go to there lay underwater! We wanted to spend a couple of months becoming Divemasters, the first of the professional scuba dive qualifications. They told us it would be the experience of a lifetime and it certainly was!

Divemaster is the first qualification that enables you to earn money diving, guiding groups or refreshing skills. The next step in training is to become an instructor, but as tempting as it was, the investment would have shortened our trip… or tempted us to stay in Utila for good.

We spent our first day in Utila visiting and getting a feel for all the diveshops and staff. Finally we decided to go with BICD for a combination of reasons including friendly and professional staff, big boats, neat premises, quality gear and some great added extras. Needless to say, we never once regretted that decision!

The first two weeks were full-on, covering all the theory work, exams and skills sessions while still loading and unloading boats and getting in our daily fun dives. Albert, the boat captain, also taught us plenty of knots and useful things. Somehow it felt like being back at uni, but having way more fun!

In general our days went a bit like this: 5.30am breakie, prepare boat, dive, unload boat, eat, watch World Cup games and then a mix of assisting in courses, completing milestones of the divemaster program and planning other fun things to do with our friends. Most days we were sleeping like babies by 9pm.

Turtles are the coolest!

DM in training milestone board

Once we finished the theory, the exciting stuff started! John gave us a workshop on hunting Lion Fish using spears (picture us practising killing onions and bottles underwater). Now many will say it’s not fair to spearfish using scuba gear (we totally agree); however Lion Fish are an invasive species in the Caribbean. As pretty as they may be, they are reproducing and eating the local reef fish at a rate of knots! So it’s become a popular sport amongst divers and, not only were we helping the reef, but we got to have ceviche with our catch!!

We also started to assist the instructors on courses, with tasks ranging from entertaining divers in training while waiting underwater, helping them to improve their buoyancy skills, playing dead/panicked/exhausted so someone could rescue us, to calming a panicked student who wasn’t sure she wanted to continue with the course. This was something that we both found really rewarding, we learnt heaps from the instructors and had loads of fun in the process!

Diving regularly around Utila, we got used to beautiful corals, and colourful reef fish, but occasionally we were visited by some bigger creatures like dolphins and whalesharks. The biggest fish in the world, the whale shark, swims past Utila on its way to Mexico and we were really excited when we found one on the way to a dive site. We jumped in the water with snorkels and were able to catch it on camera, it was a baby, just 3 metres long…but they can grow up to 18m (think the size of a bus). It was a real thrill and hopefully it won’t be our last encounter with the magnificent creatures.

We also got to do a “dry dive” in the local hyperbaric chamber so we can be tenders (the helper on the inside) in case of a real emergency. The chamber fits three people at a time and was slowly pressurised to a “depth” of 18m at which point we got a few minutes to muck around and see what it feels like (hot, dry and our voices went helium-high).

With a bit of motivation, anything is possible on Utila, so one day after a lot talking, we decided we wanted to play basketball and make the most of reduced gravity to try crazy dunks. After a few weeks collecting a bunch of materials, planning logistics and an afternoon to put it together in the workshop we were ready to play. With a nice sandy bottom, a ball filled with fresh water and the home-made hoop hanging from the anchor chain, it was pretty awesome!! Fellow DM and talented filmmaker Joel (www.joelsharpe.com) is working on putting together a dunk compilation, so stay tuned!

As a celebration for our 100th dive, tradition says that you have to dive nude. Joel, Skye, Ana, Xavi and I reached the milestone around the same time, so we decided to make it more fun and go for a group nude-dive. We jumped in clothed (for the sake of the others on the boat) and then stripped off behind some coral, for the hilarious 30min that ensued. We were really lucky to be diving in warm waters and not to run into any other unsuspecting divers, although a big octopus caught all our attention. The pictures are censored, but we came up with a commemorative postcard for the family album.

Our 15 minutes of fame came one day when a Eduardo, a Honduran TV presenter, came out diving with us as part of the Utila episode of TuristeandoHn, a program on tourism in Honduras. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kDGsSnMxLpI– interview around 11:00 mins.

As we were finishing up the last requirements of the course, we were given an amazing opportunity to do a week internship at the dive resort next door. We assisted Divemaster Willie with his wonderful customers Pat & Jody and the incredible Pedro and Dave. Normally with four customers, 2 assisting DMs wouldn’t be necessary, but Dave & Pedro are both in wheelchairs so they needed some extra help under the water. Willie spotted lots of the harder to find species like frog fish and seahorses and the guys were amazing, inspiring and gave us so many laughs and excellent experience at the same time.

Finally, the last step in becoming a Divemaster is the infamous “snorkel test”. How they’re done differs from shop to shop and country to country, but ours involved donning a mask and specially adapted snorkel (complete with funnel attached to the top) and then waiting to see what lovely beverages or other items the instructors decided to inflict on us. We somewhat bravely decided to make this our last night in Utila before a 5am ferry to the mainland, and it was a night to remember.

Our time in Utila and the DM course left us with amazing memories, a great bunch of new mates and the confidence and qualifications to guide and help out other divers in and out of the water. Leaving was a really difficult decision, but there are many countries still waiting to be visited and we’ll go back there in the future for sure.

Next up, more tales to come from Nicaragua as we got back into the backpacking routine to continue our journey south.

Big hugs!
Xavi & Sal